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Panasonic P2 camcorders and Canon XF series camcorders are all shooting footage in .MXF format – a file type not well supported by most popular professional video editing software, like Cyberlink Power Director. Before talking about editing MXF files in CyberLink PowerDirector, we’d better have a quick learn about MXF.

A brief summary of MXF

MXF is a file format for the exchange of program material between servers, tape streamers and to digital archives. Its contents may be a complete program as well as complete packages or sequences. There are basic facilities available for cuts between sequences and audio crossfades. This way the sequences can be assembled into programs. MXF is self-contained, holding complete content without need of external material.

MXF bundles together video, audio, and program data, such as text – together termed essence – along with metadata and places them into a wrapper. Its body is stream based and carries the essence and some of the metadata. It holds a sequence of video frames, each complete with associated audio, and data essence, plus frame-based metadata. The latter typically comprises timecode and file format information for each of the video frames. This arrangement is also known as an interleaved media file.

On PowerDirector’s specifications page, it is clearly displayed what kind of video files are supported by the program, and MXF is not in the list. But what to do if you just have a PowerDirector 10 installed and wanna use it to create you own masterpieces? At this time, Aunsoft TransMXF software is what you need. Aunsoft MXF Converter is developed to bridge the gap between MXF recordings and various professional video editing applications, as well as different multimedia devices. With regarding to importing MXF footage to PowerDirector, you can use Aunsoft product to convert MXF files to HD MPEG-2 for extended editing in Cyberlink PowerDirector.

There is a PowerDirector export setting in Aunsoft, that is MPEG-2 HD Video (*.mpg), you can simply check this preset as target format in the dropdown list of “HD Video” profile after loading MXF footage clips.

Soon after the MXF conversion, you are able to import the converted HD MPEG-2 files to PowerDirector for further editing.